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Torturer’s Apprentice

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.

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Umberto Eco, in his best-selling 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor. In the movie, he is played with serpentine menace by F. Murray Abraham. The year is 1327, and Gui has come to an abbey where a series of murders has been committed. It falls to him to convene a tribunal and examine the suspects. Eco describes the inquisitor’s bearing as the tribunal gets under way:

He did not speak: while all were now expecting him to begin the interrogation, he kept his hands on the papers he had before him, pretending to arrange them, but absently. His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is, and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power).

Bernard Gui is a historical figure. He was a Dominican priest, and in 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for a broad swath of southern France. Over a period of 15 years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy. We know the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his Liber sententiarum, his “Book of Sentences.” It is a folio-size volume, bound in red leather. File a request at the British Library, in London, and before long the document will be delivered to the Manuscripts Reading Room, where you can prop it up on a wedge of black velvet. The writing, in Latin, is tiny and heavily abbreviated.

Inquisition records can be highly detailed and shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne:

An event like this would typically have occurred on a Sunday, in the course of a ceremony known as a sermo generalis. A throng would gather, and the various sentences would be read aloud by the inquisitor. The recitation of capital crimes came last, and the prisoners were then turned over—relaxed was the euphemistic term—by the spiritual authorities to the secular ones: churchmen did not wish to sully themselves with killing. To emphasize that his hands were clean, the inquisitor would read a pro forma prayer, expressing hope that the condemned might somehow be spared the pyre—though there was no hope of that. Bernard Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when he condemned 17 people to death.

Late in 2010, Google Labs introduced something called the NGram Viewer, which allows users to search a database of millions of published works and discover how often particular words have been used from year to year. If you search for the word inquisition, you’ll get a graph showing a sharp upward climb beginning about a decade ago. The word comes up more and more because people have been invoking it as a casual metaphor when writing about our own times—for instance, when referring to modern methods of interrogation, surveillance, torture, and censorship. The original Inquisition was initiated by the Church in the 13th century to deal with heretics and other undesirables, and continued off and on for 600 years. But it’s a mistake to think of the Inquisition as just a metaphor, or as relegated to the past. For one thing, within the Church, it has never quite ended; the office charged today with safeguarding doctrine and meting out discipline occupies the Inquisition’s old palazzo at the Vatican. More to the point, the Inquisition had all the hallmarks of a modern institution—with a bureaucracy, a memory, a procedure, a set of tools, a staff of technocrats, and an all-encompassing ideology that brooked no dissent. It was not a relic but a harbinger.

You can see this in the work of someone like Bernard Gui. Few personal details are known about the man himself, but Eco’s fictional characterization gets at something authentic. He was methodical, learned, clever, patient, and relentless—all of this can be inferred from the paper trail. Gui was a prodigious writer. Among other things, he compiled a lengthy manual for inquisitors called Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, or “Conduct of the Inquisition Into Heretical Depravity.” The manual covers the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter and also provides advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a death sentence.

Gui would never have put it this way, but his aim in the Practica was to create something like a science of interrogation. He was well aware that interrogation is a transaction between two people—a high-stakes game—and that the person being interrogated, like the person asking the questions, brings an attitude and a method to the process. The accused may be wily and disputatious. Or he may seem humble and accommodating. He may feign insanity. He may resort to “sophistries, deceit, and verbal trickery.” The inquisitor, Gui advised, needed a variety of “distinct and appropriate techniques.”

Gui’s was not the Inquisition’s first interrogation manual, but it was one of the most influential. A generation after Gui, another Dominican, Nicholas Eymerich, produced the Directorium inquisitorum, which built on the work of his predecessor and achieved even greater renown. In our own times, the techniques of interrogation have been refined by psychologists and criminologists, by soldiers and spies. Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as Human Intelligence Collector Operations, the U.S. Army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date.

The inquisitors were shrewd students of human nature. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being questioned would employ a range of stratagems to deflect the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out 10 ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigning astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the Army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”

But the well-prepared inquisitor, Eymerich writes, has ruses of his own. To confront an unforthcoming prisoner, he might sit with a large stack of documents in front of him, which he would appear to consult as he asked questions or listened to answers, periodically looking up from the pages as if they contradicted the testimony and saying, “It is clear to me that you are hiding the truth.” The Army manual suggests a technique called the “file and dossier approach,” a variant on what it terms the “we know all” approach:

The HUMINT [human intelligence] collector prepares a dossier containing all available information concerning the source or his organization. The information is carefully arranged within a file to give the illusion that it contains more data than is actually there … It is also effective if the HUMINT collector is reviewing the dossier when the source enters the room.

Another technique suggested by Eymerich is to suddenly shift gears, approaching the person being interrogated in a seeming spirit of mercy and compassion, speaking “sweetly” and solicitously, perhaps making arrangements to provide something to eat and drink. The Army manual puts it this way:

At the point when the interrogator senses the source is vulnerable, the second HUMINT collector appears. [He] scolds the first HUMINT collector for his uncaring behavior and orders him from the room. The second HUMINT collector then apologizes to soothe the source, perhaps offering him a beverage and a cigarette.

Eymerich and the Army describe many other techniques. You can try to convince the prisoner that resistance is pointless because others have already spilled the beans. You can take the line that you know the prisoner is but a small fish, and if only you had the names of bigger fish, the small one might swim free. You can play on the prisoner’s feelings of utter despair, reminding him that only cooperation with the interrogator offers a path to something better. The Army manual refers to this as the “emotional futility” approach:

In the emotional-futility approach, the HUMINT collector convinces the source that resistance to questioning is futile. This engenders a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness on the part of the source. Again as with the other emotional approaches, the HUMINT collector gives the source a “way out” of the helpless situation.

And then there is the matter of torture. Pope Innocent IV authorized its use by the Inquisition in 1252 in the papal bull Ad extirpanda. Few words summon the Dark Ages as quickly as torture, but the uncomfortable reality is that the emergence of torture as an instrument of justice marks the advent of a modern way of thinking: the truth can be ascertained without God’s help.

Torture as a tool of jurisprudence was little known in the darkest part of the Dark Ages. The ability of human beings to discover the truth was thought to be limited. Thus the reliance not on judges or juries but on iudicium Dei—the judgment of an all-knowing God—to determine guilt or innocence. This often took the form of trial by ordeal. The accused would be submerged in water, or made to walk on red-hot coals, or forced to plunge an arm into boiling water. If he or she suffered no harm, or if the wounds healed sufficiently within a certain period of time, then it was the judgment of God that the accused was innocent. This regime was common in Europe for many centuries. It was unquestionably primitive and certainly barbaric. In its favor, it was devoid of hubris about what mere mortals can ever really know.

The late-medieval revolution in legal thinking—manifest everywhere, from Church courts to secular ones—took the pursuit of justice out of God’s hands and put it into the hands of human beings. In his book Torture, the historian Edward Peters explains that the medieval legal revolution was based on one big idea: when it came to discovering guilt or innocence—or, more broadly, discovering the truth about something—there was no need to send the decision all the way up the chain of command, to God. These matters were well within human capacity.

But that didn’t quite settle the issue, Peters goes on. When God is the judge, no other standard of proof is needed. When human beings are the judges, the question of proof comes to the fore. What constitutes acceptable evidence? How do you decide between conflicting accounts? In the absence of a confession—the most unassailable form of evidence, the “queen of proofs”—what form of questioning can properly be applied to induce one? Are there ways in which the interrogation might be … enhanced? And in the end, how do you know that the full truth has been exposed—that a bit more isn’t waiting to be discovered some little way beyond, perhaps with some additional effort? So it’s not hard to understand, Peters concludes, how torture comes into the picture.

From time to time, exhibits of torture instruments go on tour. The effect is oddly Disneyfied—a theme-park view of interrogation. The very names of the instruments reinforce a sense of distant fantasy: Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Judas Cradle, Saint Elmo’s Belt, Cat’s Paw, Brodequins, Thummekings, Pilliwinks, Heretic’s Fork, Spanish Tickler, Spanish Donkey, Scold’s Bridle, Drunkard’s Cloak. They could just as easily be the names of pubs, or brands of condoms, or points of ascent on a climbing map.

The Inquisition rarely resorted to these specific instruments. It relied on three different techniques, all of them used today. Before a session began, the person to be interrogated would be brought into the torture chamber and told what was about to be done. The experience of being in conspectus tormentorum was often enough to compel testimony. If not, the session commenced. A physician was generally in attendance. Meticulous records were kept; the usual practice was for a notary to be present, preparing a minutely detailed account. These documents survive in large numbers; they are dry, bureaucratic expositions whose default tone of clinical neutrality is punctuated matter-of-factly—“Oh! Oh!”—by quoted screams.

The first technique used by the Inquisition was known in Spanish as the garrucha (“pulley”) and in Italian as the strappado (“pull” or “tug”). It was a form of torture by suspension, and worked through simple gravity. Typically, the hands of the person to be interrogated were tied behind his back. Then, by means of a rope threaded through a pulley or thrown over a rafter, his body would be hoisted off the ground by the hands, and then be allowed to drop with a jerk. The strain on the shoulders was immense. The weight of the body hanging from the arms contorted the pleural cavity, making breathing difficult (asphyxiation was the typical cause of death in crucifixion, for the same reason).

Under various names, the garrucha appears frequently in more-recent history. Senator John McCain was subjected to a version of it, called “the ropes,” by the North Vietnamese, after his airplane was shot down during the Vietnam War. It has been employed in the interrogation of prisoners in U.S. custody. One well-known case is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died during interrogation at Abu Ghraib in 2003. His hands had been tied behind his back, and he had then been suspended by the wrists from the bars of a window five feet off the ground. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police at the time, explained the consequences to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker:

“If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired.”

The second technique employed by the Inquisition was the rack. In Spanish the word is potro, meaning “colt,” the reference being to a small platform with four legs. Typically the victim was placed on his back, with legs and arms fastened tautly to winches at each end. Every turn of the winches would stretch him by some additional increment. Ligaments might snap. Bones could be pulled from their sockets. The sounds alone were sometimes enough to encourage cooperation in those brought within hearing distance. Here is an account of a suspected heretic who had been placed on the potro and was being questioned by inquisitors in the Canary Islands in 1597. The winches had just been given three turns. The suspect would confess after six more. The recording secretary preserved the moment:

On being given these he said first, “Oh God!” and then, “There’s no mercy”: after the turns he was admonished, and he said, “I don’t know what to say, oh dear God!” Then three more turns of the cord were ordered to be given, and after two of them he said, “Oh God, oh God, there’s no mercy, oh God help me, help me!”

The third technique involved water. Toca, meaning “cloth,” was the Spanish name, referring to the fabric that plugged a victim’s upturned mouth, and upon which water was poured. The effect was to induce the sensation of asphyxiation by drowning. Waterboarding is the English term commonly used today. The modern term in Spanish is submarino. One historian writes:

Even a small amount of water in the glottis causes violent coughing, initiating a fight-or-flight response, raising the heart rate and respiratory rate and triggering desperate efforts to break free. The supply of oxygen available for basic metabolic functions is exhausted within seconds. While this is sometimes called “an illusion of drowning,” the reality is that death will follow if the procedure is not stopped in time.

The CIA has acknowledged that one of its detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month. Defenders of the practice contend that this figure is misleading—that 183 refers to the number of individual “pours,” and that they occurred in the context of no more than five “sessions.”

As it happens, the Inquisition invented that defense. In theory, torture by the Church was strictly controlled. It was not supposed to put life in jeopardy or cause irreparable harm. And torture could be applied only once. But inquisitors pushed the boundaries. For instance, what did once mean? Maybe it could be interpreted to mean once for each charge. Or, better, maybe additional sessions could be considered not as separate acts but as “continuances” of the first session. Torture would prove difficult to contain. The potential fruits always seemed so tantalizing, the rules so easy to bend.

The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades. Arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. The documentary record pried from intelligence agencies could easily be mistaken for Inquisition transcripts. The lawyer Philippe Sands, investigating the interrogation (which used a variety of techniques) by the United States of a detainee named Mohammed al-Qahtani, pulled together key moments from the official classified account:

Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Allah several times.

The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To place this in perspective: the administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.

The regulation of torture never really works—it just points the practitioners in new directions. Darius Rejali, one of the most prominent scholars of torture, puts the matter simply: “When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky.” The phenomenon is sometimes called “torture creep.” Inquisitors were well aware of the dynamic. We see it today when interrogators, queasy about extracting information by means of torture, send prisoners to be interrogated in countries without such scruples. The process is known as “extraordinary rendition”—a way of keeping your own hands clean, the equivalent of the Church’s “relaxing” the condemned to the secular authority. (During the past decade, the United States has handled an estimated 150 suspected terrorists this way.) In medieval times, torture was at first limited to crimina excepta—crimes of the utmost gravity—but that category was eventually broadened, and the threshold of permissibility lowered. In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, in May 2011, a number of commentators claimed that the al-Qaeda leader’s hideout had been discovered owing to information gleaned from torture—demonstrating how worthwhile torture can be. The claim was false, but the fact that it was made illustrates a falling threshold: where once torture had been justified only by some urgent “ticking time bomb” scenario, now it is seen as an acceptable way to obtain intelligence of a more ordinary kind.

Amoral brutes certainly commit torture, but in their hands it doesn’t become part of a legally sanctioned system. Torture becomes legitimized in the hands of a different sort of person—one who is determined to use the powers of reason, and believes in the rightness of his cause. This is what the writer Michael Ignatieff means when he calls torture chambers “intensely moral places.” Those who wish to justify torture don’t do so by avoiding moral thinking; rather, they override the obvious immorality of a specific act by the presumptive morality of the larger endeavor. The Bybee memo maintained that interrogators could not be prosecuted if they were acting in good faith: “The absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture.” It is the same logic advanced by the inquisitors. Citing Thomas Aquinas, they argued that purity of motive forgave the crossing of any line.

Which, in the end, is the most dangerous inquisitorial impulse of all—that sense of moral certainty. In America today, religion asserts itself repeatedly and increasingly. Oklahoma and a dozen other states have introduced legislation to ban the use of Islamic sharia law in any way within their jurisdictions, despite the fact that it has become a problem exactly nowhere. Schoolbooks in Texas have been revised by government fiat to downplay the idea of separation of church and state. During the past decade, public libraries have faced challenges on moral grounds to more than 4,000 books in their collections. The notion of America as a “Christian nation” has emerged as a theme—explicitly or by innuendo—in the current presidential campaign. When President Obama, in 2009, maintained in a speech that what united Americans was not a specific religious tradition but “ideals and a set of values,” he was attacked by a wide range of public figures.

But religion is not the only culprit. The Enlightenment, which was supposed to be the antidote to this sort of thinking, gave rise to uncompromising outlooks of its own. For some, the higher power is not God but the forces of history, or democracy, or reason, or technology, or genetics. Fundamentally, the inquisitorial impulse arises from some vision of the ultimate good, some conviction about ultimate truth, some confidence in the quest for perfectibility, and some certainty about the path to the desired place—and about whom to blame for obstacles in the way. These are powerful inducements. Isaiah Berlin foresaw where they would lead:

To make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever—what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know, of Pol Pot … You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it must be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time.

Pasted into the front of Gui’s Liber sententiarum is a sheaf of 17th-century correspondence that describes how the book came to the British Library in the first place. It was discovered by the philosopher John Locke in the late 1670s, in the archives of Montpellier. Locke understood the importance of what he had found, and arranged for the manuscript to be sent to the historian Philipp van Limborch, in the Netherlands, who was compiling a history of the Inquisition. “When you see what it contains,” Locke wrote his friend, “I think you will agree with us that it ought to see the light.” Limborch published Gui’s document as an appendix. Years later, a buyer was found for the manuscript on behalf of the British Library. Locke wrote his famous Letter Concerning Toleration in 1685. He made the case for freedom of thought and expression—and a certain humility regarding one’s own cherished beliefs—on the grounds that, no matter how much certainty is in our hearts, human beings cannot know for sure which truths are true, and that believing we can leads us down a terrible path.

The correspondence tucked into Gui’s manuscript offers a reminder of what Locke understood. The Inquisition is not a closed chapter. It is an open book.

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